“Sorry to drop in like this, Brian,” I said, remembering his name.
“Did y’all just jump off the bridge? Were you in the race?”
“Yeah,” I said, as the boat hit a rock.
We moved to opposite sides and muscled the little skiff onto dry land. Well, dry rocks anyway.
It’d probably been fifteen or twenty minutes since we’d entered the water. I could usually swim for three times that long, with little effort, but towing the boat against the current had sapped the strength in my arms and legs.
The paramedics from the ambulance were quickly beside the boat, and Savannah got out, allowing them room to work. I could tell she wanted to stay and hold the boy’s hand, even though he was still unconscious.
One of the paramedics looked up. “Does anyone know who he is?”
“A Cuban rafter, drifting on the tide,” I replied. “Can he be moved off the boat? You could probably work better over there on the sand.”
The paramedic, a guy I only knew as Drew, looked at me. “That policy ended three years ago, Jesse. We’re just here to get him to the hospital. What happens after that is up to the courts and whether this boy has family here in the States.”
“Everybody’s got a cousin in Miami,” I said, quoting the popular Jimmy Buffett song. “Mind if my wife and I ride with you?” I jerked a thumb toward the Seven Mile Bridge. “It looks like we’re out of the race, and neither of us is wearing shoes.”
Brian and I helped the EMT guys carry the backboard over the rocky shoreline and sand to where they’d left the stretcher at the foot of the ramp. A uniformed deputy was standing there.
“Are you the one who found him?” the deputy asked.
“My wife and I,” I replied, nodding toward Savannah, still holding the boy’s hand.
“I’ll need to get a statement.”
“A boat was adrift with a little boy on it. We jumped in the water and brought the boat to Pigeon Key. Jesse and Savannah McDermitt. End of statement.”
He joined us, jotting our names on a simple, spiral-bound notepad as the paramedics strapped the boy and the backboard to the stretcher and began wheeling it up the wooden ramp to the waiting ambulance.
I looked at his name tag—Deputy B. Fife.
I couldn’t help but grin. “Anything else, Deputy Fife?”
“Before you ask, yes, that’s my real name and no, my first name isn’t Barney. It’s Bradford.”
I was sure he got that a lot, so I decided against asking if he had one bullet in his shirt pocket.
“Anything else, Brad?” I asked instead.
“I’m going to need more than that simple statement,” he said. “Like who is he and where did he come from.”
“I don’t know what else we can tell you, Deputy,” I said. “Look at him. Then look at that boat and the ninety miles of open water across the Gulf Stream. Where do you think he came from? What do you think happened to his family? Your guess is as good as mine.”
The boy was strapped to the gurney with a white sheet over him. He had dark features, and hair as black as night. There was a bruise around his left eye.
As we wheeled him up the ramp, the boy stirred and moaned. When he opened his eyes and looked around, I could see the fear etched on his face.
Savannah leaned over the little boy and spoke softly in Spanish, holding his hand reassuringly. “Estás seguro. Estamos aquí para ayudarte,” she said, telling him he was safe and we were helping him.
“What?” the boy murmured. “Where am I?”
Savannah and I looked at each other, confused. He not only spoke English, but with no accent.
The deputy and paramedics looked just as confused.
“What’s your name?” Savannah asked. “Where are you from?”
The boy looked totally bewildered. “I don’t know?” he whined, as we reached the waiting ambulance. “Are you my mom?”
We stood there in disbelief as they loaded him in. How does an American kid end up on a homemade Cuban boat?
The deputy turned to face me. “Now I have a lot more questions, Mr. McDermitt.”
I looked at him, then at Savannah, and finally at the boy. His eyes were closed again.
“Can my wife go with him, deputy? I’ll stay with you and answer any questions I can while we look at the boat. Something’s not adding up here.”
He nodded to Savannah, who climbed into the back of the ambulance, accepting a blanket from one of the paramedics.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital in a little while,” I told her.
Then the doors were closed, and the ambulance drove away.
“So, he’s not Cuban,” the deputy said.
“I was sure he was a Cuban refugee,” I said, as we turned and started down the ramp.
“Understandable,” Fife said, looking at the boat on the rocks. “He’s definitely Hispanic and that boat looks like others I’ve seen rafters come over on.”
At the bottom of the ramp, Fife stopped and pulled his notebook out again. As I watched, he quickly sketched the scene before us.
“During my rookie year, my partner always made me sketch what I saw,” Fife said. “He told me it trains the eye to look for more details.”
He finished and we crossed the sand to where Brian stood, keeping tourists away from the boat. Though the bridge was closed to private vehicular traffic, tourists still visited the island by ferry.
Fife wore jungle boots, typical for a lot of Florida cops. They had drain holes to let the water out. There weren’t many places in the southern half of the state more than a stone’s throw from water.
Together, we waded around the rocks to the side of the boat.
“Oarlocks, but no oars,” Fife said, taking his notepad out and jotting something down.
“And that transom has never seen an outboard,” I added. “No markings from the mount.”
Fife pulled the small piece of canvas out. There was nothing at all under it. No empty water bottles, no food
